Polymer-Based Conformal Space Radiation Shield with Thermal Management Manufactured by Five-Axis 3D Printing Platform

Enhanced radiation in space can greatly decrease the lifespan of the electronics in spacecraft and satellites. To maintain a regular operation of the spacecraft in an intense radiation environment, the radiation-hardened electronics and the bulk space radiation shields made from aluminum, tungsten, etc. are currently utilized. However, despite being magnitudes more expensive than its commercial-off-the-shelf counterparts, radiation-hardened electronics sacrifice performance to increase radiation tolerance and thus cannot be adopted in the future high-power, high-performance space computing where only the commercial-off-the-shelf electronics can be used. Along another line, the conventional bulk shields are heavy, which reduces the payload. In addition, the thickness of the bulk shielding is determined by the electronics with the least radiation resistance which usually is the commercial-off-the-shelf parts. Therefore the adoption of commercial-off-the-shelf electronics can further increase the weight. To tackle the challenge, Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. proposes a novel conformal polymer-based radiation shield design to lower the weight of the radiation shield without compromising the radiation attenuation. Such a shield can also provide enhanced local spot shielding for commercial-off-the-shelf electronics without increasing the overall thickness of the shield. Such a radiation shield has a multi-layered atomic number gradation design that uses the metal oxide polymer composite to provide 110% to 250% improvements for radiation attenuation compared with aluminum of the same weight. In addition, a fiber-reinforced polymer composite is designed to serve as the heat spreader with > 100 W/m-K in-plane thermal conductivity which is significantly larger than typical polymer. Moreover, by adopting the advanced five-axis additive manufacturing system, the curved surface in the conformal radiation shield can be printed continuously compared with the conventional planar additive manufacturing technology where the layers are discontinuous resulting in decreased structural strength, layer uniformity, and heat dissipation.